jam packed weekend

It's ironic how I was just writing about my "relax" work days, when in just a few days after that, I ended up having an all-night-all-day work weekend.

We had a huge release last weekend and even during pre deployments, we already ran into a whole lot of different issues. That must've been a premonition because during the actual release night, we encountered this huge issue (something to do with caching). Luckily, we have great teammates who helped us out in figuring out what was wrong - we woke them up around 4 am in the morning :). And business gave us time to get it fixed before doing a rollback. Good thing we got that extra time as we finally got it to work!

I was awake friday to saturday morning (in Pacific time), and then had to support another release happening saturday night to sunday morning (in Pacific time too).

Crazy weekend, but in the end, we pulled thru. We have some production issues, but no showstoppers, which is a good thing. So in order for me to go back to relax mode, I had all my fixes fixed and deployed yesterday so that QA and UAT may test it and eventually we could get it redeploy and promoted to Production by next week.

What a weekend. I think it was only yesterday I caught up with sleep - I slept for 10 hours. :) I'm taking the day off this coming friday. I need to make some time for Chase this weekend. I haven't seen him for almost a week and half!

some free time

I've had little development task over the past two weeks, which is a good thing because I haven't really had this much free time compared to last quarter of 2009. The free time has allowed me to watch tv, eat, sleep, etc. Just kidding! The free time has actually gotten me to work on my other random tasks at work, like improving our alarming system, fixing up some shell scripts I've had hanging around, etc. It's always nice to get something done that's been pending for quite a while because you've been prioritizing the projects before these "subtasks" but which may also be equally as important.

Aside from that, I've gotten better long and uninterrupted sleep this week compared to the past two weeks.

I feel quite good. Maybe since last weekend's release is done, and there's only one more release left for this month (this coming weekend), I'm very much looking forward to relaxing more.

I've also started listing down the things I'll be needing for my travel this coming Feb. Better be ready now than last minute (I experienced that the first time)!

pig out at dampa

Our team has been recognized in our department for one of the projects that was successfully implemented to Production (it was a 2 year project). As a reward, the big boss went to treat the whole team out for lunch. However, since some of us are back here in Manila and we can't join them over there in Canada, our manager gave us a budget of around 50$ per head so we can go out and enjoy ourselves here. :) 50$ per head... pretty big... that's around 2000 per person and there were four of us, bringing the total of 8000 pesos budget.

So we were deciding where to eat and stuff ourselves... we had a ton of choices but we ended up going to Dampa. This way, not only do we enjoy seafood fest, but we got to order probably one of the most expensive dishes there is - 1.5kg Lobster. Holy crap it was so big! That cost us 2700 (just for the lobster). We had it separated, lobster soup and the lobster itself. We also had huge lapu-lapu fish (costs us around 1000+ just for the fish), crab, shrimp, mussels, beef and broccoli and liempo. This was probably one of the best meals I've ever had!!! And you know what, we almost finished all of it. The liempo wasn't that good, but the rest were awesome.

Here's before it was cooked:


Here's after it was cooked:


Here's the team: The huge lapu-lapu hasn't come out yet at this point!

thoughts on haiti earthquake

When I initially heard about the Haiti earthquake, I thought that it may have damaged a couple of structures only, but as news came pouring in, I didn't expect it to be so much more tragic. Just watching the events uncover there, the pictures, breaks my heart. We just feel so helpless.

What's heart breaking is that a lot survived the quake, but a lot has also died because there was no immediate medical aide available at once. As Doctors Without Borders says... "Patients who were not critical only three days ago are now in critical phases. This means that people will die from preventable infections. It's horrible."

This is just sad.

Such a poor country, recently hit by a hurricane, and now a devastating earthquake. Of course, government is partly to blame as they probably didn't have building codes to ensure that structures are well built. But I guess there's no point in pointing fingers now. At least from what we see from this tragedy, we see people stepping up to help. As for us who are left watching the news for updates, let's just continue praying for the best to the people of Haiti.

3rd time travel to canada

So after a long long wait, my travel request has been finally approved. There were some problems because the company didn't want me to renew my work permit over at Canada, so they wanted me to go there, and then go back before my work permit expires. But my manager in Canada wanted me to stay the whole 4 months there as this was the original plan for the whole team - we rotate 4 months each going to Canada. Anyway, so they finally approved, and my flight will either be January 30 or Feb 06 and will be returning either May/June, depending on my departure date. The original date was Jan 30 but I requested to move it to Feb 06 so I'd have company going there (my teammate's departure is Feb 06 too).

This will only mean that I have to prepare! Not that I need a lot of stuff, but I just realized, I don't have much work clothes anymore. We just wear casual clothes here in Manila so I may need to revamp my wardrobe a bit. We're going there winter time (and right in time for Vancouver Winter Olympics) so hopefully, the jacket I left behind there will suffice (but I'm guessing not!).

I am excited, but sad again. I'm just thinking and hoping this will just be like a short vacation again. And we're going to Vegas in April, so that's something to look forward to!

Avatar = Awesome

We finally got to watch Avatar last Sunday. Well worth it, I should say. I don't know how or where James Cameron gets his creative ideas. He created this whole new world for us to discover, and translated it to something we could all enjoy. Too bad Chase and I missed the first 10 minutes of the movie ( I couldn't figure out why Jake had an avatar! ) - blame it on Recto's traffic. But anyway, this movie definitely didn't disappoint. The 400 peso IMAX fee was well worth it.

And I read somewhere that James Cameron was going to have 2 sequels, if the movie becomes a hit. Well, given how it's overtaking Titanic in the box office, I would think that we are definitely going to anticipate two more, or at least one more avatar movie!

avatar

Chase and I attempted to watch Avatar twice already - one last December 25, and another attempt made last sunday. Unfortunately for both instances, we were unable to watch it as it's always sold out! So for this coming weekend, we will make sure we get tickets. This time around, we've made reservations. By Saturday, Chase's sister will pick up the tickets in MOA, and by sunday, hopefully, we'll finally be able to watch this highly recommended film in IMAX! That's right, we want to watch it in IMAX (even though it costs 400 each)... I think it's gonna be well worth it.